Dishwasher

When apartment/house-hunting, I had my own certain requirements that my new place had to have. Among these: at least 2 bedrooms, at least 1 and 1/2 baths, hardwood floors, a good location, and a dishwasher. To my boyfriend's dismay, I actually ranked having a dishwasher higher than a washer/dryer (just slightly, but higher nonetheless). Luckily, all of the places in our price range that we looked at DID have a dishwasher, so no argument there.

But again, I digress...

While having a dishwasher seems to also rank high in Stephanie's list of requirements, I'm not quite sure she knows how to use one yet.

I like to stock up on certain things whenever they are on sale (for example...toilet paper, paper towels, dish soap, etc.). The local grocery store had advertised dishwasher tablets as buy 1 get 1 free...so of course I had to indulge and get two boxes. The tablets didn't seem to QUITE fit in with the dishwasher...but they seemed to work fine once you just forced them in there.

I was usually the one in charge of running and emptying the dishwasher (side note: Stephanie and I seemed to have an unspoken agreement in that I was in charge of emptying the dishwasher and she was in charge of taking out the trash, as I did not mind the dishwasher chore, and she seemed to enjoy emptying the trash each day). But every once in awhile, I would notice that the dishwasher had been run, but the dishes didn't appear to be clean. Upon further inspection, it seemed that the dishwasher tablet was usually somewhere in the dishwasher, but still in its protective wrapping. When I would see this, I would run the dishwasher again, this time taking the tablet OUT of the plastic. This seemed to make the soap much more effective.

I never brought this up with Stephanie, but one day she decided to ask me about it.

Stephanie: "I don't think the dishwasher is working very well."

Me: "Oh?"

Stephanie: "Well, it just seems that the water isn't getting hot enough."

Me: "Oh. Well, I don't really have a way to check that. But it seems pretty hot, because whenever I take the dishes out of the dishwasher, they are super-hot."

Stephanie: "Maybe. But the water isn't even hot enough to melt the plastic that the dishwasher tablets come it."

Me: "Um...what?"

Stephanie: "Yeah. Sometimes I put a tab in, and run the dishwasher, and the tab is still in its plastic when it's finished running."

Me: "Um...I'm pretty sure that you're supposed to take it OUT of it's plastic before you put it in."

Stephanie: "Are you sure? They should probably put that on the label or something."

Um...they DO put that on the label. On the protective plastic wrapper on each tab it says "please remove plastic before use."

Stephanie doesn't need an automatic dishwasher...she needs a butler to actually wash her dishes for her. Perhaps she can dip into her 401k and hire one.